How to write puns: List, rhyme and twist

Choose fluent words for wordplay

When the Federal Trade Commission needed to explain why the agency has decided not to develop a do-not-spam registry — officials feared that spammers would target people on the list — a spokesperson said:

“You’ll be spammed if we do — and spammed if we don’t.”

How can you craft such a good pun or play on words? One approach is to list, rhyme and twist. Here’s how:

1. List.

Write down the key or topic words from your article.

Then expand your list. The more words, the better. Try synonyms, antonyms and different forms of your keyword — spam, spams, spammed and spamming, for instance.

Visual Thesaurus and OneLook Reverse Dictionary are great tools for adding words to your list.

2. Rhyme.

Use rhyming dictionaries to find words that sound similar to your keywords. My favorite is RhymeZone.

Keep looking. RhymeZone doesn’t recognize “spammed.” But it did send me to OneLook Dictionary Search for words ending in “ammed.” (Input “*ammed.”)

I searched for one of them — slammed — back at RhymeZone, which gave me this list: crammed, dammed, damned, jammed, rammed, scammed.

Next, find phrases that include those rhyming words at Phrase Thesaurus or ClichéSite.com. In fact, I found another starting point for the FTC sound bite by doing this research:

Publish and be damned.

3. Twist.

Now substitute your key word for the rhyming word. Make it:

Publish and be spammed.

List, rhyme and twist in action.

This approach can result in headlines covering …

… The Chicago’s Ritz-Carlton ranking best hotel in the United States in a reader poll:

How the Ritz Was One

… A couple of new movie theaters being built in the same neighborhood:

Coming soon: Two theaters near you

… Turbulent Spanish elections:

New Reign in Spain

… A consultant hiring a personal trainer after he hit a plateau working out on his own:

My muscles, so to speak, had grown accustomed to the pace.

… A blistering (and bearish) week in August:

It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Economy

The launch of Playboy.com:

Silly Rabbit, These Clicks Aren’t For Kids

Choose fluent words.

The best words to play with are fluent words — that is, they’re short (one syllable’s best), sweet and easy to pronounce.

That’s why the first step in wordplay is to expand your word list by finding related words. For a story on how to manage your inheritance without making common missteps, for instance, the word in my head was “inherit” — not very fluent. So I ran it through OneLook Reverse Dictionary and landed on the word “heir.”

Now, “heir” may be one of the best words to play with in the English language. That’s because “heir”:

• Is a homophone that sounds like err and air. That makes it easy to sub a soundalike, like:

Err apparent

• Looks as if it sounds like hair, which makes it easy to list and twist:

Bad hair day

• Rhymes with dozens of words, including care, dare, fair, pair, prayer, rare, scare, share and their — all good candidates for listing, rhyming and twisting.
• Looks as if it could be pronounced here, which allows more listing and twisting:

Heir today, gone tomorrow

• Is short, sweet and easy to pronounce.

Don’t wait for the muse.

Some lucky communicators are natural-born phrase twisters. I have to substitute systems and processes for talent.

If you’re like me, list, rhyme and twist key words in your next story for a sassy sound bite or surprising headline.